20 More Cities Want To Join the Fight Against Big Telecom's Broadband Monopolies 97
Jason Koebler writes At least 20 additional American cities have expressed a formal interest in joining a coalition that's dedicated to bringing gigabit internet speeds to their residents by any means necessary—even if it means building the infrastructure themselves. The Next Centuries Cities coalition launched last week with an impressive list of 32 cities in 19 states who recognize that fast internet speeds unencumbered by fast lanes or other tiered systems are necessary to keep residents and businesses happy. That launch was so successful that 20 other cities have expressed formal interest in joining, according to the group's executive director.
if i voted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:if i voted (Score:5, Insightful)
because a governmnet monopoly is the best kind.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Not quite a monopoly (Score:5, Interesting)
In Denver, CO we can choose between Century Link DSL (speeds suck) or Comcast (expensive and service sucks). If the city of Denver jumped in that would at least give us three choices. Competition is good, right?
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You would prefer TWC? Look at the bright side, at least you have another option, even if the speeds do suck.
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not when the other two companies are forced to subsidize their competition.
but hey, as long as local bueracrats can build castles.
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You realize that the US government has given BILLIONS to these companies to roll out internet infrastructure, right? It would only seem fair that they subsidize their competition since their business was subsidized, as well.
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Ahh, so since we have screwed up once, we have no choice but to simply keep screwing up?
Your local municipalities, school districts, counties, and states will do anything to grow their castles. That I see you granting your government more power and authority for the sake of netflix access shows that your vote can be bought with the simple promise of convenience. You are just what your local bureaucrat is hoping for.
Re:Not quite a monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)
Telecoms is a fairly clear-cut case of a natural monopoly and will always tend to favour monopolization.
I generally hold that it's in the public's interest if natural monopolies are tax-funded rather than provided by companies. Companies without competition have no reason to care about consumers, no market to control costs or improve value - so a government that is accountable to voters is actually MORE free market in a natural monopoly than a private company (since the voters and the consumers are the same people).
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CenturyLink has announced 1GB service "soon" in Denver. Pricing is unclear but it appears they want to sell it bundled with land line phone service. I would prefer the City of Denver develop a high speed network as a public utility.
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The highest DSL speed from CenturyLink at my house in Denver (in the city itself) is 1.5Mbps and they've been telling me that they'll be bumping up the speeds "soon" for years. They even send me flyers occasionally advertising speeds that they won't sell me.
My recommendation is to sign up for Comcast's business service is you are stuck with them. It's only marginally more expensive than residential service and it doesn't suck nearly as much.
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Years back, 1.5Mbps service was a holy grail, now it's a backwater benchmark. What happened?
Streaming internet video happened.
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In Denver, CO we can choose between Century Link DSL (speeds suck) or Comcast (expensive and service sucks). If the city of Denver jumped in that would at least give us three choices. Competition is good, right?
I've seen ads from Century Link that they plan on offering 1gbs fibre service in Denver. I haven't looked into it, so have no other information (timing, area, cost, etc.) In the meantime, your neighbors to the north in Longmont approved municipal gig a while ago and signup for the service in the first area has begun. Apparently a dark fiber loop was laid a decade or two ago while other work was being done, but state laws - the usual we've heard about here on slashdot - prevented the city from using it to of
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Denver - Century Link's high speed (I'm just talking about their ads for 40Mbs) coming to (maybe) your neighborhood. I was told by more than one CL rep that there are no plans to bring it to my neighborhood.
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In some cases, yes it is. And I consider myself a mild liberation.
There are cases of "natural monopolies" where left to itself the market tends to narrow down to a single provided. Look for industries that have high fixed capital costs to start up but low marginal costs after that. Network effects help too. If that is the case, then you often need government regulation to ensure a well-functioning market. Now, what type of regulation is complex.
Jean Tirole won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
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In some cases, yes it is. And I consider myself a mild liberation.
Presumably you meant "mild libertarian" there.
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Yes, good catch. Thanks. Darn small screen, auto correct.
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Well Comcast has proved it's monopoly is certainly not the best kind.
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That depends on whether you are a customer or a shareholder.
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Essentially, the municipal approach is treating broadband as a public utility. If there can only be one system of sewer pipes in a given city, it has to be run this way.
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The best approach I've seen is for the municipality to own the physical network, and then lease access at fixed rates to anyone wanting to run an ISP on top of it. Best of both worlds.
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> because a governmnet monopoly is the best kind.
It's pretty much the only alternative, if the other kind of monopoly isn't giving you what you want.
Re:if i voted (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, monopoly is bad, but I'd much rather have a monopoly that has to listen to the votes rather the one that doesn't.
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...and if "voting" actually provided a way to override the will of the telecom giants. Believing that constituent voices will override telecom campaign donations and lobbyists is adorable, but not very effective.
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What is basically happening is the Telecoms are vested in controlling Federal and State government and they only have influence at local city level where their headquarters and regional headquarters are. This means that all the other businesses by far the majority of campaign contributors have far greater influence on local cities. So feeding the greed of a handful of companies at the expense of hundreds of thousands of companies falls over that the local level with the influence of those hundreds of thous
A lot of sound and fury (Score:1)
I'll start paying attention when, at a state level, they start declaring utility franchise agreements illegal.
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Amen. But perhaps that is the threat. Either make things better or they will make sure it happens.
Re:Meaningful Competition? (Score:4, Insightful)
Meaningful Competition Drives Progress: a vibrant, diverse marketplace, with transparency in offerings, pricings, and policies will spur innovation, increase investment, and lower prices. Communities, residents, and businesses should have a meaningful choice in providers.
I don't see how a government takeover will enhance competition. Mostly it will increase the cost of cable TV, at least until some other group decides that watching prime time TV is a fundamental human right.
I have a TV antenna in the attic, let them raise the cable TV rates.
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I have a TV antenna in the attic, let them raise the cable TV rates.
Dvorak says that OTA broadcasting is going away. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/... [pcmag.com]
He also happens to be an outspoken critic of the current movement demanding "'Net Neutrality" by FCC / government regulation. He makes some good points, too. I won't repeat them here, because I always get hammered and flamed when I point out the flaws in the proposals in this space.
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I don't see how a government takeover will enhance competition.
Can you point me to where in any of the linked articles this coalition is talking about takeovers? I've assumed that their goal was to offer a competing service to the telcos, not to takeover any existing telco service(s).
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Indeed, if there were existing telco services comparable to what they want to install, they wouldn't need to do it.
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Since the telcos would rather take their ball and go home than improve service, it's a de facto takeover.
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Except they never actually have taken their ball and gone home. There are plenty of examples out there where municipalities have rolled their own networks out, and the cable and telco companies still operate there. I'm not aware of a single location where the cable companies have left, and the telcos aren't legally allowed to leave because of Federal law (not that there's any evidence they would if they were able).
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Government (or really a quasi-public company) owns the last mile. Vendors compete to provide the content. You pay the government X dollars per month to cover the cost of upgrade and maintenance of the fiber coming to your house, and then you choose from Verizon/Comcast/TWC and the packages/bandwidth you select.
In practice this isn't too different from how my electric bill works - National Grid charges me for the delivery and the electricity, but I can shop around to get electricity cheaper from other vend
Re:Meaningful Competition? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the key point is to decouple the content from the last mile network. when a house can choose between different cable suppliers and different internet suppliers, that's when the competition happens.
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Exactly. There's only so much telephone pole space (or underground conduit).
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hmm that reminds, me what ever happened to internet over electric cables? The elect company's are not saving and replacing old infrastructure as they should be. I've seen plenty of news stories about how bad our grids are and how everything needs to be replaced but is not. Who owns the cables??
The neighborhood grid is owned by a single delivery company (AEP in most of central Ohio), while the generation is provided by "competitors".
The U.S. generally does not have broadband over power lines for two reasons:
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I would totally vote to have an entity that is (at least lightly) accountable to citizens/voters in order to put a little competitive pressure on the current crop of duopolists.
Actually, where I live, there is at least a city employee who is responsible for collecting complaints about the cable & phone companies to whom the city has granted rights. I once sent this person an e-mail with TWC issues and received call-backs from TWC a few days after e-mailing that person.
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That they run on the same lines by the same companies is not part of the conversation
You can't separate them. Take away half of the revenue that the existing connection brings in the other half will need to make it up.
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I don't see how a government takeover will enhance competition.
By dissecting the natural monopoly (the last mile) from the unnatural monopoly (the service provider)
Currently, I can buy electricity from three dozen loosely regulated companies that compete for my dollar. No matter who I buy from, that electricity will get delivered over the same physical copper connection to my house. That piece of copper is maintained by a single, strictly regulated utility.
Under this system, everybody's priorities are in the right place. The last mile utility can only make more mone
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I don't see how a government takeover will...
Sorry, I think you mistook slashdot for some Fox News forum?
I expect we'll probably see and hear the phrase "government takeover" quite a bit from the Fox News crowd on this issue. It's obviously incendiary; designed to spread fear and disinformation to the public. It's also totally baseless. As if municipal broadband is some kind of coup? As if the "gobmint" is going to prevent ISPs from doing business in this country? As if they are going to seize the assets of ISPs in order to control the information sen
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I don't see how a government takeover will enhance competition. Mostly it will increase the cost of cable TV, at least until some other group decides that watching prime time TV is a fundamental human right.
Most people don't care about competition so much as they care about whether they can get decent service to begin with. Non-government monopolies have little interest in service quality, and frankly, it's not the highest priority in most cases for large non-monopoly businesses either. But Please Stay On The Line Your Call Is VERY Important To Us.
The major advantage to government monopoly is that government has a vested interest in listening to the customers, since unlike most corporations, consumer/voters ca
Google Fiber (Score:1)
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It's not static, but they do hand out IPv6 IP's.
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Full bore Telecom Panic in 3-2-1. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
The Telecoms absolutely will throw a Godzilla sized tantrum since the high density metropolitan areas are their biggest cash cows they have. They would give two shits about losing some barely on the map town in the middle of nowhere, but you're talking about where the big $$$$ live now.
There will be lobbying, crying, arguments, pleading, secret back-room deals, and just mass hysteria for all the Telecoms. Hell, they might even get off their ass and start doing something now that they see a very frightening possibility of real competition to their profits starting to rear its head.
It will be glorious
Socialism (Score:5, Funny)
That is just so damn Un-American not letting Corporate monopolies rip you off
Well.. (Score:1)
I live in Provo and they created the iProvo network. It didn't go so well and we ended up paying for it through the energy bills. On the bright side, Google bought it and now the companies here are actually competing. So if the cities mean build a network and have google take over, then I'm all for that.
Why not just free the market? (Score:3)
Most of these companies are local monopolies because the local politicians were bribed to give them a monopoly. You don't have to build your own just get rid of the monopoly.
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They might be able to survive in a competitive market, but it isn't 100% certain that they would. Plus, they would need to put more effort into improving service (both speeds and customer service) and prices would be forced down. Why do all that when you can just buy... I mean, lobby politicians to set the rules such that you are the only service provider in the area. You and your fellow mob bosses... I mean, big telecoms can divide up the country into territories so everyone can keep from competing anyw
Florida? (Score:2)
Wish I could see a list of the 20 additional cities. I doubt any of those are in FL either...the entrenched good ol' boy network down here would never let that fly.
Oh boy, even more oversubscription. (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, let's say for sake of argument you bring gigabit to every doorstep. Or heck, even 1% of doorsteps. All of your uplinks are going to be so massively oversubscribed that it's essentially meaningless, except for content that's hosted on local caching servers. This is great for things like Netflix, but even ultra-high quality 4K video with uncompressed multichannel audio isn't going to consume that much bandwidth. 40Gbit connections are standard on the largest backbones, with 100 Gbit coming on-line, but that's some awfully expensive hardware right now.
So my question would be: what added benefit you expect to get with a gigabit local loop when it's still going into the same sort of congestion limits? i don't mean to sound like a curmudgeonly old bastard, but this sounds more like a marketing gimmick. Even governments aren't immune from spreading marketing bullshit; in fact it's sometimes easier when you know you won't be held accountable (advertising fraud vs political promises) and it's all other people's money anyway.
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Solution; Build local, Buy local (Score:1)
Most outgoing pipes are over subscribed anyway. Put the gigabit in place and let the markets sort out the demands on bandwidth for outgoing/incoming pipes. In the meantime, let the local markets invent and invest in providing content. Image all of your favorite local TV channels streaming live or 2way interactive class rooms from your local college. Enter into negotiations with Netfliks to franchise a local streaming data center. Start a new Wifi-cell phone service. There are thousands of ideas
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http://www.toecdn.org/ [toecdn.org] TOECDN will help you to cache all the static content, locally. This should bring your congestion down, depending of course how much of the data is static in the first place.
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So I'm looking at it a slightly different way. The municipality runs the "last-mile" fiber, then they aggregate the links at some level (larger than neighborhood, smaller than city, preferably with minimal over-subscription). For each ISP who wishes to provide service, they co-locate in said facility and plug in to the aggregation layer, you can use things like MPLS for example to segregate the links. At this point, it's up to the ISP to decide 1) who they want to peer with, 2) where they want their connect
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I had another thought on the entire matter as well in that even if the municipalities manage to pull this off, at some point they still have to hand the traffic over to one of the big boys on the block ( eg, the telecoms ) for it to be useful since they own all the long haul lines. Unless Google steps in and offers their " services ".
Why does Google remind me of the Mafia . . . . lol
I would suspect they'll use that as leverage in the upcoming discussions abou
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Your not You're
all I got to say is this from TFA (Score:2)
just like rest of infrastructure in the city. Need good roads, schools, water, etc.
20 More Cities (Score:1)
Awesome! So which cities are among the 20?
Socia wouldn't tell me what cities have expressed interest, because they haven't formally joined yet.
So there's no news here, and this is just a pointer back to Vice's previous article.
Gigabit next week (Score:2)
My city is taking subscribers for gigabit service starting next week, and it's not on the list.
So successful (Score:1)
That in NC TimeWarner's service level has fallen off a cliff and prices jacked 20% and they are laughing at you.
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I was going (Score:2)